In November 2007, Salman Ullah, Sean Dempsey, and Peter Hsing came together to form Merus Capital, a venture capital firm that wanted to raise $125 million for its first fund. Given the founders’ backgrounds, it didn’t seem overly ambitious. Ullah had been Google’s VP of corporate development, where he worked with Dempsey, and Hsing was coming from Microsoft, where he had been a general manager of corporate strategy. But like many firms trying to pool capital in today’s inhospitable fundraising environment, Merus is assembling a much smaller fund -- and at a much slower rate -- than expected. Indeed, according to a May SEC filing that I stumbled across tonight, the Palo Alto-based has raised just $36 million so far and has amended its filing so that it might continue its fundraising indefinitely.
2 min read · 24 June 2009
Last year, self-made Israeli billionaire and media mogul Haim Saban quietly entered the business of venture capital, adding an early-stage digital media practice to his seven-year-old, Los Angeles-based investment company, Saban Capital Group. Today, I caught up with the head of that practice, native New Zealander Craig Cooper, who’s also been a venture partner at VantagePoint Venture Partners and a founding partner with Softbank Capital. Cooper also co-founded Boost Mobile, a teen-focused wireless startup that sold to NexTel in 2003 for an undisclosed amount. Among other things, we talked about what it’s been like working for Haim, whose net worth has reportedly dropped by a third in the last year, what Cooper makes of friend and former colleague Eric Hippeau becoming CEO of Huffington Post, and how the economy has impacted what a year ago was a vibrant venture scene in sunny Southern California. (Hint: it’s gotten bushwhacked.)
6 min read · 23 June 2009
Billionaire Paul Allen hasn’t an easy month. Most notably, Allen, who famously invested upwards of $7 billion for a 52% stake in now-bankrupt Charter Communications, sold nearly all of his Class A common stock holdings in the company -- 28.5 million shares -- for a grand total of $996 last week, according to an SEC filing. (Analysts are still puzzling over why he bothered.) No sense dwelling on that silly matter, though! That seems to be the message coming from Allen’s camp, which today released the news that Allen is both funding and has founded a Seattle email software startup called Xiant (which apparently began life as Allen’s personal email sorting system). Xiant's software, which is available for free download here, enters a crowded field of startups that promise to make life easier for Outlook users. Just one example of another young company with a meaningful head start is Xobni, which began life as a Y Combinator startup and whose email plug-in has
2 min read · 23 June 2009
3 min read · 22 June 2009
In Paris over the weekend, Bill Gates and his dad gave Fortune an enjoyable, nine-minute-long interview in which Gates speaks about how his upbringing may have helped him become a billionaire. I'm sure that giant brain deserves far more credit than his being frogmarched to softball practice, but hey, maybe it was a combination of the two. Video after the jump...
1 min read · 22 June 2009
A reporter with the newspaper weighs in today with her own experience on Tagged, the social networking site we reported on a couple of times this past week. Surely, it's a piece that no one involved with the company is happy to see:
1 min read · 20 June 2009
2 min read · 19 June 2009
Earlier this week, I reported that Tagged, a social networking service that began life as a Facebook for teenagers, has reportedly evolved into a spam machine. I also noted that when I approached the company to chat about dubious recruiting processes, my press requests were handled very poorly. I concluded that, between the two, its high-profile investors had reason for concern. Yesterday, TechCrunch published a related story, saying I’d been overly “harsh” and that I’d managed to draw a line “practically putting the company in the deadpool,” when the company is “actually humming along quite nicely.” I finally caught up with Tagged’s CEO, Greg Tseng, this morning, and we chatted about the chatter, as well as what’s really going on at the four-year-old company.
6 min read · 18 June 2009
Paul Holland, the general partner at Foundation Capital who leads the venture firm's clean tech practice, is attempting to build the "greenest custom-built home in America." It may also be the biggest. Check out video of what will be his family's energy-independent Portola Valley, Calif., campus/house after the jump.
1 min read · 17 June 2009
1 min read · 17 June 2009
